Proved Oil Reserves by Country, 2013

In the wake of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez‘ death, I was reading several news articles about the country. One of them mentioned that Venezuela had the largest proven oil reserves of any country in the world.

So I looked it up. And sure enough, Venezuela is number one according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency.

But to salve my ego, I was able to determine that this is a recent occurrence. Saudi Arabia was indeed number one up until around 2007; Venezuela was in fifth or sixth place back in 2000. Apparently someone down there has found a lot of the black stuff very recently. And to be fair, there evidently is uncertainty about exactly how proved “proved” is. Oil reserves often are listed as a range rather than a single number.

Incidentally, at first I balked at calling it “proved” oil reserves. Just didn’t sound right. But evidently that’s the accepted term (at least according to the EIA), so I went along with it in the end.